Dr. Jenna Hill to speak at the Horry County Museum

The Horry County Museum and the AVX Foundation present a lecture by Dr. Jenna Hill on Saturday, February 18th, on icebergs along the South Carolina and Florida coast.

As the ice sheets across North America melted following the last ice age, huge icebergs calved off into the sea, drifting in ocean currents across the North Atlantic. Many of these icebergs travelled east, staying in polar regions, but new evidence from seafloor iceberg scours suggest hundreds of massive (10-story tall) icebergs likely drifted south along the coast past Georgetown, South Carolina, with some traveling all the way to the Florida Keys before completely melting. These icebergs would have been carried south by huge outburst floods of melting ice water that were able to overcome the northward flow of the Gulf Stream. Learn how new high-resolution maps of the seafloor combined with modeling of past ocean currents has helped us follow the surprising path of these icebergs and what that tells us about future melting of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica.

Dr. Jenna C. Hill is an Associate Professor of Marine Science at CCU with a focus on Coastal and Marine Geology. She earned her Ph.D. in Earth Sciences in 2007 from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, examining the influences of long term sea level and climate change on continental margins. Since coming to CCU, she has worked on a range of projects examining past climate and ocean circulation, coastal morphology and seafloor habitats, and coastal geohazards, particularly tsunami-generating underwater landslides.

The program will begin at 1 pm in the McCown Auditorium located at 805 Main Street, Conway SC. This event is free and open to the public. For more information, call 843-915-5320 or email hcgmuseum@horrycounty.org. To view a full list of programs, visit our website at www.horrycountymuseum.org.